By Mark Dwortzan
As Brett Goldberg
P'76, prepared to board a flight to Israel in 1976, his ailing grandfather left him with these parting words: "Always make yourself necessary." The founder and president of Ahava-USA, the Dead Sea skin care and cosmetics product line, Goldberg has lived by this credo ever since. "It holds true whether you're making a product or contributing to your community," he maintains. "If you can find the one thing you're uniquely suited to provide, then you've found your niche."
In a career that spans the past quarter century, Goldberg has found his niche—and then some. On several occasions, he has applied his uncommon skills where they were needed most—to benefit the State of Israel.
In 1981 the Israeli government tapped Goldberg, an expert in Ethiopia's native language, Amharic, to help pave the way for the airlift of thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel. As a linguistics major at Yale, Goldberg had specialized in Amharic and headed the college's Association for Ethiopian Jewry. Upon graduation, he served Israel's Jewish Agency as an interpreter during a three-week fact-finding mission to Ethiopia. When the mission concluded, he spent six months in Israel preparing language materials for the expected influx of immigrants.
Goldberg next joined the Israeli army out of a sense of commitment and strong identification with Israel, which never wavered since he first read the novel
Exodus at age nine. "When the Lebanon war broke out I was the only 21-year-old not in uniform," he recalls. "I decided it was time to get with the program." The first step was to make aliyah. Next came six months of basic training, then one year as a tank commander plus eight more as a reservist. It was as a reservist that his fluency in another language, Arabic, first came in handy. As the only Ashkenazi member of HaShoarim (the gatekeepers), a unit of Arabic-speaking tank commanders, Goldberg was called upon to train soldiers in allied Lebanese militias. (Goldberg first studied Arabic at Prozdor with Professor Dov Eron.)
After completing his 18 months of regular service in 1984, Goldberg moved to Jeroham, a small town of 6,000 in the Negev, where his singular ability to read Apple computer manuals landed him a job as a high school computer science teacher. Goldberg's move to Jeroham stemmed from frequent conversations with his army buddies about settling in and improving one of 28 "development towns" in the country. Originally designed to accommodate a wave of immigration in the early 1950s, development towns like Jeroham had long suffered from poverty and unemployment. "You come out of the Israeli army with a utopian, can-do attitude," Goldberg notes. "We were a tremendously idealistic group that wanted to strengthen the weakest link in Israeli society."
With that goal in mind, Goldberg next turned to another passion of his: entrepreneurship. In 1985 he left teaching to start a company that produced vinyl dust covers for electronic equipment. "My objective was to prove you could start a business with local initiative," he says, noting that the town of Jeroham depended largely on government funding for job creation. Goldberg's startup employed ten people, but ran through his entire life savings before it closed down in 1991. Penniless and without direction, Goldberg found himself at a turning point. "It was time for me to get a life and start a family," he then concluded. "I also thought it would be good to export something."
That's when a stable, lucrative job opportunity presented itself: the chance to use his entrepreneurial skills to import Ahava products to the United States, where demand was on the rise. Goldberg quickly seized the opportunity and became founder and president of Ahava-USA. But upon his return to the States, he still harbored thoughts of going back to Israel. What nipped those thoughts in the bud was a fateful meeting with Eve Berenblum, the head of Saks Fifth Avenue's cosmetic department in New York City. "On my first sales call I met my wife-to-be," says Goldberg. "If I hadn't met her I probably would have gone back to Israel and made a halfhearted attempt to export from Israel. I still have the second half of the plane ticket."
Today Goldberg lives with his wife and eight-year-old daughter, Isa, in Greenwich, Connecticut, and remotely manages Ahava-USA's 20 employees and 60 independent sales people from a nearby office. One of Israel's greatest export success stories, Ahava-USA won the Israel trade award in 1994 and netted $17 million in retail sales last year.
Part of Goldberg's motivation in promoting the company's Dead Sea product line is to help customers maintain their connection to Israel. "When you use these products, you're in a small way transplanting yourself to the sights and smells of Israel," he says. Goldberg also enjoys working the phones with buyers of the product who share that connection. "My job brings me in contact with a wide range of people on any given day," he observes. "I could deal with Hasidim in Brooklyn and evangelicals in Houston."
Goldberg attributes much of the success of Ahava-USA to lessons in teambuilding and cooperation that he learned while serving in the Israeli army. Drawing on his military experience and flair for language, he recently carved out yet another niche for himself: published author. Goldberg's first nonfiction book,
A Psalm in Jenin (Modan, 2003), illustrates how a diverse group of ten Israeli reservists maintained their humanity and embodied Jewish ethics as they confronted Palestinian terrorists on the ground in the Jenin refugee camp.
Goldberg wrote the book to counter news reports in the United States of Israeli Defense Force misconduct during its raid of the camp (known as Operation Defensive Shield) in 2002. "After Operation Defensive Shield, I figured that if there was this much confusion in America, then Americans don't understand Israelis," he says. "I wanted Americans to reconnect to average Israelis and understand their character."
A Psalm in Jenin is perhaps the most tangible of Goldberg's lifelong efforts to advance Israel and Jewish causes through direct action and philanthropy. Last August, Goldberg received the "Spirit of Achievement" award at the Fourth Annual American Friends of Soroka Medical Center of the Negev Gala Dinner for building Ahava-USA into a leading Israeli export brand and supporting the Ethiopian community in Israel.
As a key contributor to Hebrew College, Brett is listed on the
Alumni Wall of Honor, is a member of the President's Circle and is a supporter of the
Rose Bronstein Fellowship. Goldberg fondly recalls studying at Prozdor under the likes of Hebrew language teacher Bronstein and Israeli author and newpaper editor Tom Segev, with whom he still corresponds. "The quality of the teaching was inspirational," he says. "Prozdor gave me a world class education. I wish we had something like it here in Connecticut for my daughter."
Goldberg also serves as a Board member of Friends of Yemin Orde Youth Village. Since 1998, Goldberg and Ahava-USA have raised funds for Yemin Orde, a Northern Israel residence for 500 at-risk high school students from Ethiopia and the former Soviet Union. The program's director, Dr. Chaim Peri, inspires him to continue striving to "make himself necessary" both at home and abroad. "He shows me what can be done with sheer imagination," says Goldberg, "and using the power of love to help achieve goals."
Brett Goldberg's Hebrew College connection extends to his sisters, Carey Goldberg P'77,
and Morgan Ritz P'86;
and his father, Charles Ritz Cert'92, Me'ah'99.
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